Deconstructing the Human Habitat

IN FEBRUARY of this year, author and social critic James Howard Kunstler, best known for his landmark anti-suburban sprawl book, The Geography of Nowhere, and Duncan Crary, director of communications at the Institute for Humanist Studies, launched the KunstlerCast, a weekly podcast to discuss, among other things, the coming end of both suburbia and cheap oil. For the 100 years preceding the end of World War II, the American city was the growing industrial city. [...] beginning in the 1970s industries started to incrementally break down and close down or move away, and we started to develop a high level of unemployment, lack of education, and cultural dislocation in the American inner city.